Val Kilmer, channeling Mark Twain, will be in Branson this month

Val Kilmer is shown in this 2011 photograph in costume as the American author Mark Twain. Kilmer will be in Branson Sept. 29 for a screening of his one-man film about Twain. He'll introduce the movie and take questions from the audience afterward.(Photo: Lewis Jacobs, Still Photographer, 2011)

It won't be Val Kilmer's first trip to Branson when the "Top Gun" actor visits late this month, but it will be his first time in the 65616 when American author Mark Twain is at the center of the agenda.

Kilmer is visiting Sept. 29 for a screening of "Cinema Twain," his 90-minute one-man play captured on film. It features Kilmer fully costumed, the spitting image of the iconic Missouri-born writer who created Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Much of the script is pure Twain, Kilmer has said, interpreted in such a way that the century-old lines read like something from today's world. When "Cinema Twain" premiered last year, a reviewer with Salon wrote, "I can't think of any screening in recent memory when the people around me seemed to enjoy themselves as much as they did there."

By phone from California, Kilmer told the News-Leader on Tuesday that he's always loved Twain.

"He's about the funniest American who ever lived," Kilmer said.

An undated portrait of American author Mark Twain first published by the Associated Press in 1935 on the 100th anniversary of Twain's birth in Missouri.(Photo: Associated Press)

Kilmer made the focus of his film the feud between Twain and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science church denomination.

"She was the woman he loved to hate," he said.

In his autobiography, Twain denounced Eddy as only Samuel Clemens could:

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it. At this very day there are thousands upon thousands of Americans of average intelligence who fully believe in "Science and Health," although they can't understand a line of it, and who also worship the sordid and ignorant old purloiner of that gospel — Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, who they do absolutely believe to be a member, by adoption, of the Holy Family, and on the way to push the Savior to third place and assume occupancy of His present place, and continue that occupancy during the rest of eternity.

Kilmer, who has also played historical figures like Doors frontman Jim Morrison, Wild West gunslinger Doc Holliday and abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, noted that in Twain's case, there's no audio floating around on which to base an actor's impression.

"I had a strong impression of his character from his writing," Kilmer said, calling Twain a person of "enormous charisma."

Twain's 2,000-page autobiography, which first saw the light in 2010 after editors worked 40 years to determine whether Twain had finished it or not (they decided he had), was published years after Kilmer began work on his one-man project, Kilmer said.

Instead, he relied on other texts from Twain's massive output: more than two dozen books, not many of them short ones.

In Branson, the audience will have the chance to hear Kilmer introduce the film and take questions afterward, he said.

After a two-year battle with cancer — a situation Kilmer called "blown out of proportion" by celebrity media — the now healthy-looking actor was spotted recently by a paparazzo photographer while out lunching with his daughter, People magazine reported last week.

He is reprising his "Iceman" role for the "Top Gun" sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick," due out in 2020. People at his Twain question-and-answer sessions ask him "Top Gun" questions, he conceded.

Kilmer also noted that his commercial and fine art, available on valkilmer.com, sometimes brings in more revenue than art-film projects he's working on. He's been "very flattered" by the response to his art.